Google Adwords - not sure if off-topic

[Nelson Marques]

Good post. I understand your concerns, but let me just express my
opinion about a couple of things:

* Considering Adword as Guerilla Marketing is kinda naive. Guerilla
Marketing is more about going to a Model Agency and hiring 20 attractive
models and send them to disco's with Fedora t-shirts and have them mix
up with the people and promote your product without a direct approach.
That would probably translate better Guerilla Marketing.

* As for partner sites. Whenever you search on Google, you have
sponsored links, not only for partner sites.

* I was not trying to cutback or give lesser relevance to the work
currently being developed in other fields. And I do agree with you,
exploring social networks is a must. Like you, I would love to see more
work done in that field as well.

* About corporate and FOSS models, sure, the main difference is that in
marketing driven corporation (Unilever? P&G? et all) usually the
Marketing Department is the connection between the Administration and
every other single department, though it most times has priviledge
relations with Commercial Departments. Marketing isn't just sales. That
is a very naive approach of Marketing. Just for example, GNOME uses
adword, and it's the marketing team which handles it. There's loads of
info on their public marketing mailing lists. Maybe I should've dropped
this email there :(. And if I am not wrong, I believe they have a small
budget allocated for it, not sure though. This is even more strange
because Fedora is a channel of distribution for GNOME (from the GNOME
point of view of course), which at some point would lead me to believe
that we should be investing in that field, not them, but this is just a
personal thought.

* About Marketing itself:

"Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain
what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and
value with others" - Philip Kotler

 The process of exchanging products and value has nothing to do with
"monetary units". I'm not quite sure why everyone tries to place $stash
there.

 Applying that to Fedora, Marketing should realize on what Fedora users
want and provide them a product (Fedora Linux) that meets their needs.
This will conduct to a recognition of Value on Fedora Linux (product) by
our users.

 There is no monetary units involved here... neither sales... it's
mainly strategical. Thats how a corporation (any multinational) usually
sees marketing. Probably smaller companies with different management
models (not marketing driven) see it as a sales force (then BANG!...
they are not competitive in most cases and blame India and China)... But
that's another story.

 Anyway, I like your idea of pushing this forward somewhere after F13. I
will be one of the supports in several things you mention, starting with
social networks.

 I am not aware if you saw the news almost 2 weeks ago, a company in
London (clothes shop I think) made a small facebook campaign. 30.000
people subscrived it, not all went to the opening, but it was chaos and
havoc, nearly riots and lots of policial agressivity on the store
surroundings, they even closed the road.

 For sure social networks do provide a good evangelization tool.


 I look forward to see a serious plan involving social networks. 

 nelson.


On Sat, 2010-04-17 at 00:17 +0200, wonderer wrote:
> Hy,
> 
> Am 16.04.2010 23:36, schrieb Nelson Marques:
> >  Not sure if the same could apply to us, or even if we use adwords, in
> > case we do and are not exploring it that way, I would suggest a test on
> > it for some "relevant" statistical data.
> >   
> In my opinion we must differentiate between Marketing and Advertisement.
> Ad words, SEO, Affiliate programs, etc. are clearly Advertisement. Make
> it work with our voice (one of our "old" foundations I sometimes miss!)
> is more Marketing. I know that these areas sometimes mixes up, but we
> have here IMHO clearly draw a line.
> Also to have in mind that there is much difference between a profit
> driven company and a community driven OpenSource project.
> 
> If or if not have budget for such adwords advertisement is another
> question which we can put on the agenda between the F13 and F14 I think.
> 
> I think we haven't had utilized all the possibility's we have to make it
> known better. Lets see what we do right now:
> * We have events where Ambassadors, proud Users, Contributers of all
> kind come together, talk about it, etc. like FUDCON, FAD, Installpartys,
> LUG events, etc.
> * We have articles in Internet gazettes, magazines, Blog entries, etc.
> * We could (in my opinion) do much more in social networks
> * we could do a little bit more in spreading the word
> 
> I also give to think of the way those adwords, adsense, etc. things
> work. You always have competitors where you comparing with, so you have
> some kind of enemy or opponent to compare to. So, I see the "friends"
> Foundation in danger.
> Also to use a very much criticized tool like google (privacy issues,
> security of data, etc.) is a very risky and "aggresive" thing. In some
> parts of the world these "Guerilla Marketing" methods are not so reputable.
> 
> Btw.: in the German version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords is
> one more paragraph about "missusage" which is missing in the english
> one. funny...
> 
> The thing behind the adwords is "only" to place advertisements on
> partner sites. That we could do easily  on our own: just make some nice
> Fedora-Banners and put them on the blogs (not only the Countdown
> Banners, also some Fan-stuff), maybe we could have some more
> representative pages at Redhat (and also a small banner here and there),
> on other pages like Distrowatch, rpmfusion, XFCE, LXDE, all the
> "partner" sites, etc.
> Thats in my opinion the way we can use the idea in the more open way.
> Also we can use our own Systems to monitor the progress - Fedora Insight
> (Zikula). Pingbacks and all kind of statistics should be doable.
> 
> Also if we have soon a more RSS friendly news System like FI we can put
> in the pages there, send them to the sites. If there will be changes the
> sites itself have nothing to do (simply feeded by FI).
> 
> If I only take a look at Distrowatch for example we are on the second
> base with "the old" F12. So we have a good reputation. I think we could
> go from that very good base to a level more of asking "what do we want
> to promote besides the next Release?"
> 
> Some idea: make some kind of feature from e.g. one spin like graphics
> spin or security spin. Make some articles, videos, banners, etc. for it
> and promote them (blog, social networks, magazines, etc.). Make that a
> Longterm project (one article every 1-2 month, talks at events, etc.).
> 
> 
> 
> mit freundlichen Grüßen / best regards
> Henrik Heigl - wonderer at fedoraproject.org
> 
> PGP/GnuPG: 8237 D432 0616 D567 DBC6  3FE3 0D52 B374 F468 A5F0
> 
>